On October 17, 1994, the New York Times pointed out the similarity between the Tigers and the Khmer Rouge, based on observations in the Jaffna liberated area. The Tigers' regime was ”brutal” and aroused "intense fear among the local populace." They waged "ethnic warfare" and practiced "arbitrary arrests and torture." "Kidnapping and murder”' were their everyday tricks of the trade. Furthermore, they had mobilized an "army of 11- and 12-year-old children" for their war of liberation. In June 1994, even the monthly Echo of Islam, published in Teheran, normally very friendly to any group that resembled a liberation movement, settled the Tigers' case in one sentence, labeling them a "fascist and racist organization." It should be noted that the Tigers' record is a very long one. Among the world's countries, throughout the 1980s Sri Lanka ranked a steady second (after E1 Salvador) in terms of the number of victims of political violence in proportion to the overall population.

Ethnic Cleansing: There are 1.2 million Muslims, either Tamil or Sinhalese converts, in Sri Lanka, and their situation is rather like that of the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. A third of them live in the northeastern part of the island, which the Tigers regard as Tamil Eelam. Partly out of a sense of tradition and partly out of fear of the Tamil separatists, the Sri Lankan Muslims are on rather close terms with the regime in Colombo. Hence the ethnic cleansing waged by the Tigers for more than a decade. Without beating around the bush this time, LTTE Secretary General Yogaratnam Yogi has repeatedly stated that the Muslims were "traitors" and justified the massacres.

In August 1990, in the village of Kattankudy, and one week later, in the village of Eravum, a total of 313 Muslim men, women, and children were massacred in two mosques, at prayer time. In October 1990, 190 Muslims, half of them women and children, were massacred in the province of Batticaloa, eastern Sri Lanka. Hundreds were wounded, 120 were widowed. In April 1992, 56 Muslims were massacred in Alingipothana. All told, in the 10 years between 1984 and 1994, 103 Muslim villages were attacked, plundered, and burned by the Tigers, leaving a death toll of nearly 2,800. In late May 1995, 150 to 200 Tigers massacred 44 Sinhalese and Muslims in a fishing village in northeastern Sri Lanka.

In June 1995, the Tigers demanded that 60,000 Muslims leave the city of Kattankudy, a port in the eastern province of Batticaloa, where the Muslims were the majority. The LTTE had already massacred 140 unarmed Muslims in that same city in August 1990. In late July, the LTTE threatened to massacre any Muslims who refused to evacuate the city of Puttalam (27,000 inhabitants in the eastern province).

Eliminating the Competition: between 1986 and 1987, all Tamil revolutionary and separatist groups other than the Tigers were annihilated and their militants integrated into the ranks of the LTTE, after "re-education." The groups included the following:
- People's Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE);
- Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO);
- Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS);
- Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF);
- Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front (ENDLF).

In 1986, the entire political leadership of TELO was murdered. As recently as 1990, an LTTE commando massacred 13 leaders of a rival group seeking refuge in Tamil Nadu.

Stalinist-Maoist Practices: a Random Sampling. Until late 1994, the guerrillas mobilized children of ages 13 and up. Since then, it has been children of ages 11 and up. There have been public executions in Jaffna, and the bullet-riddled bodies of the "traitors" have then been strung up on lamp posts. There are concentration camps in the liberated area, like the one at Mattuvil, set aside for approximately 500 militants, but also for the daughters and wives of "deviationists." There, like the Khmer Rouge, female guards, often less than 14 years old, from the "Birds of Liberation," (the LTTE women's organization), mistreat, torture, and sometimes kill female prisoners, or use them as prostitutes for Tigers out on a spree. It should be pointed out that all of this information comes from testimony gathered and pieced together by impartial humanitarian associations based in Sri Lanka. For example, in July 1995, the Association of University Professors for Human Rights, a highly regarded Tamil NGO, accused the Tigers of recruiting children as soldiers and then using them as "cannon fodder."